Why I Missed My First Winner At Ascot!

I wasn’t present when my first Royal Ascot winner came in last week.

Ascot
Unfortunately, I was on my holidays! But it was nice to see Commissioned win the Queen Alexandra Stakes under Adam Kirby; Royal Ascot is like the Cheltenham of the flat season so we really enjoyed it. My assistant Olly Murphy was keen on his chances before the race but there was no secret really, it’s just a case of being lucky on the day.

We try to pick the right type of horses and thankfully this one worked out well. We bought him with the plan to run him in the race the previous Tuesday but the ground was too soft and he went straight in on Saturday.

It wasn’t the best scenario weight wise but thankfully he came up trumps and it was great.

Placing horses in the correct races is a great poser for any trainer and I really enjoy the challenge, thankfully I’ve been very lucky at it.

At Royal Ascot we also saw the likes of Tepin come over from Amercia and win, and in time maybe it’s something that we could see happening in the jumps, but I think it would need a lot of sponsorship and a lot of money behind it.

Winners
Buonarotti Boy scored a great win at Kilbeggan earlier this month and I was delighted with that. He followed up with a second at Gowran last week and he’s a horse that is going to win plenty of races, he’s a good horse to have.

I trained my first winner in Ireland with the same syndicate way back in 2007 with Toran Road at Kilbeggan so it was nice to repay them with this!

Galway
Speaking of Kilbeggan, Jack Kennedy have Tiger Roll a great ride last night to make it 2 wins from 2.

He’s had his problems but we seem to have him back on track at the moment.

He’s a good horse on his day and the plan is now to head to Galway with him. They’ve made improvements there in recent years, there’s plenty of prize money and it’s great what they’re doing. Galway is not something I really target but I will still have my fair share of runners and hopefully a few winners too.

Don Latest
There’s no real update on Don Cossack at this stage. He’s at home with Gigginstown and he’s on the walker so we’ll keep an eye on his progress.